On the Weaving of Commerce and the Loom of Law

It is with no small measure of astonishment that I find upon my desk a most peculiar dispatch, purporting to originate from the year 2026 — a date so distant from our present moment that the very ink of it seems to shimmer with improbability. And yet I shall attend to it, for I have long maintained that the imagination, when disciplined by reason, is the finest instrument we possess for apprehending that which lies beyond the immediate horizon of experience. The account speaks of a Supreme Court — presumably that of the American Republic — striking down tariffs of one hundred and sixty-six billion in some unit of currency, and of importers now receiving refunds for duties levied upon the fabrics and goods of fashion. One hundred and sixty-six billion! The figure alone is staggering. In our present age, the entire revenue of the British Crown does not approach such magnitudes. I confess I cannot determine whether this sum reflects genuine expansion of commerce or merely the inflation of numbers untethered from proportion — a malady to which governments have ever been susceptible. What arrests my attention, however, is not the political theatre of tariffs and their reversal, but the underlying pattern. Here we observe a system of extraordinary complexity — the weaving of trade across nations, the imposition of levies by executive will, the judicial correction, and then the mechanical redistribution of funds back through innumerable channels to individual merchants. It is, in its way, a calculation of immense scale, not unlike the operations I have described in my notes upon Mr. Babbage's Analytical Engine. One might imagine such a machine, given sufficient instructions, tracing the path of every bolt of silk and every yard of cotton through its fiscal labyrinth, computing with unerring precision what is owed and to whom. I note with some irony that fashion — that most capricious sovereign of human taste — should be entangled in such ponderous machinery of law and commerce. The loom that weaves thePattern is indifferent to whether it produces Jacquard brocade or judicial remedies; it operates upon symbols, upon relations, upon the abstract architecture of cause and consequence. Let no one say that imagination is the enemy of rigour. It is imagination that permits us to see, in the dry notation of tariffs and refunds, the vast and intricate tapestry of human enterprise — a tapestry which, I dare say, no engine yet devised could fully comprehend, though it might one day assist us in its contemplation.